Ask HN: How to make the home buying/selling process suck less?

I know this is slightly off-topic but I figure I'd share an approach to picking a solid buyer's or seller's agent that someone told me about that might interest folks reading this thread.

Define a geographical bounding box for the area of the home you wish to buy or the area of the home you are selling that your potential buyer's might be looking in. This could be a circle with a 0.5 mi radius in very dense cities or several miles for not-as-dense locations.

Then, search on Redfin or Zillow for all closed sales in the last N months for properties in your bounding box that meet your general criteria. Note you may have to adjust the value of N, what "general criteria" means, and your bounding box definition to get a good number of closed sales.

Finally, go through each closed sale and tally the number of sales & purchases each agent has. Anecdotally in dense areas, you should see the same few agents buying and selling homes. Interview the top X and pick an agent.

If your agent is going to get paid a lot - at least make sure they have a ton of local knowledge.

All those things you complain about are part of the infrastructure that makes it possible.

I mean it's easy to avoid the spam calls, just pay cash.

And it's easy to avoid the broker's fee, just buy directly from the property owner...

...Or better yet, have your lawyer do it.

To put it another way, you are on the ad-supported tier without any in-app purchases.

Real estate is the domain of wealth and home sales are check cashing not banking.

Good luck.

That seems amazingly expensive from here in Scotland (I make the distinction as the legal system and the process of house selling/buying is different to the reset of the UK) - we bought and sold properties a few years back and went for an up-market solicitors to handle the process. They were very good and the marketing materials and videos they produced were excellent quality (e.g. the photographer and her assistant were there for a couple of hours - moving a lot of furniture in the process).

The full cost for selling and buying was well under 1% of the house we sold.

Sometimes. Some of them are absolutely awful, but the market is hot enough that they make up for it with volume rather than repeat business.

I think this is a really naive idea, I think you're seriously underestimating the level of complexity in a real estate transaction. You're dealing with what is for many people is the most impactful and expensive purchase of their life. In that transaction, they have imperfect, limited knowledge of the market and acquisition process. Further, there are varying levels of dishonest actors within the process - with an extreme range of dishonesty present. Top that off with the fact that you're actually negotiating with imperfect information as well... :exploding_head: Having an actual expert present who can enable you to be successful is extremely empowering and much more likely to result in a positive outcome.

Now, all that being said, it's obvious there's a deficit of actual SME's who are extremely helpful in the process. I've purchased two homes... one with an agent who I feel would fit right in with the culture of the used car salesman stereotype and another who actually was that SME. She knew the market inside and out, knew what to look for in the neighborhoods, and found the problems in each house we looked at. She had connections that got us through a weird mortgage issue (multiunit home converted into one with... sloppy paperwork), helped with specialized inspections (radon issues), and provided great advice when dealing with a cantankerous negotiator. I certainly didn't find my money wasted there and actively recommend her for anyone in the NW Columbus, OH area. There's a lot that could be done to improve the situation - higher requirements for education and qualification of realtors, prohibiting companies from being the buyers and sellers agents, etc. There's a lot to automate as well. But when there's serious complexity and life changing quantities of dollars floating around, an expert should be strongly valued.